A few days ago, the last pound coin of the current 32-year-old design ever to be made rolled off the presses at the Royal Mint, in Llantrisant, South Wales. Soon after, it was delivered to the Royal Mint’s museum — as a memento of one of the best-loved coins in British history.

A total of 2.2 billion pound coins have been manufactured since the first of the type was struck by Prince Charles on April 21, 1983.

Around 1.5 billion remain in circulation — the rest having been lost down the back of sofas, left abroad or returned to the 1,000-year-old Royal Mint.

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The last of the old-style one pound coins, right, rolled off the production lines a few days ago. They will be replaced by the new 12-sided design, left, which it is believed will be far more difficult to counterfeit

And now we are to get a new pound, said to be much harder to counterfeit, which will be introduced in 2017. It will take over from an item that is as much part of our lives as our front door key.

The old pound coin is wonderfully robust. Many dating right back to 1983 are still in circulation and remain in good shape; the £1 banknotes they replaced only had a lifespan of nine months.

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The pound coin was also introduced to meet the growing popularity of vending machines in the early Eighties.

However, the problem with Britain’s only simple ‘yellow metal’ coin — which is the thickest in general circulation — is that it’s easy to fake. It’s thought that 3 per cent are counterfeit — that’s a total value of £47 million.

Every year, two million fake pound coins are spotted and taken out of circulation. (It’s illegal to spend or pass on a fake pound; instead you should take it to a police station.)

Each year, two million counterfeit £1 coins are taken out of circulation

Explaining the introduction of the new coin, a Treasury spokesman said: ‘With advances in technology making high-value coins like the £1 ever more vulnerable to counterfeiters, it’s vital that we keep several paces ahead of the criminals to maintain the integrity of our currency.’

And so the new version will, according to the Treasury, be the hardest coin to fake in the world.

As part of an increased security drive, polymer banknotes will also be introduced, with a £5 note featuring Winston Churchill, and a £10 note featuring the novelist Jane Austen, coming out in 2017.

Polymer notes are 25 per cent cheaper to manufacture, and their thin, plastic film allows greater security measures to be included. The new pound coin, it is hoped, will be much harder to fake thanks, in part, to its more complicated, 12-sided shape.

Indeed, it will remind older generations of the threepenny bit — the three pence piece introduced during the reign of Edward VI (1547-53) and withdrawn from circulation in 1971 on decimalisation. Incidentally, it was the first coin to feature a portrait of the current Queen.

Of course, the new pound will have a portrait of Elizabeth II on one side. On the reverse, there will be the four national symbols of the UK — a rose, leek, thistle and shamrock — bound by a crown. The design was chosen after a national competition, won by 15-year-old boy from Walsall.

Understandably, the Royal Mint doesn’t discuss the steps it has taken to beat forgers, but it has revealed that the new coin is a ‘bimetallic’ combination of two metals.

‘The public need to be able to recognise easily that a coin is genuine,’ says Adam Lawrence, the Royal Mint’s chief executive. ‘The coin will have visual features that will be very hard to replicate, and some covert features that only certain people will be able to recognise.’

It will certainly follow a remarkable history.

Our current £1 coin wasn’t the first one. That honour goes back to Henry VII. In 1489, he ordered the officers of the Royal Mint to ‘produce a new money of gold’. The result — Henry VII’s Sovereign — had a value of one pound sterling, then the most valuable coin ever seen in England. (A pound in 1489 would be worth the equivalent of £681.60 today).

However, the planned change will require every vending machine and parking meter in the country to be modified to accommodate the replacement coins which are due to be introduced in 2017

As for those pound coins introduced in 1983, taking inflation into account, they would be worth £3.01 today. When introduced, they were the highest denomination coin in circulation.

Like many things, the original idea for the pound can be traced to the Romans. The pound sign — the ‘£’ — comes from the first letter of the Latin words ‘libra pondo’, literally meaning ‘the weight of a pound’. ‘Pondo’ gave us our word, ‘pound’. The early English pound had the value of one pound in weight of pure silver.

There have been 24 different reverse designs on the £1 coin since its introduction, reflecting the four countries of the UK — each image showing bridges, capital cities and national emblems, along with the Royal Arms of the UK.

The first series had floral emblems of the four UK countries: the oak for England; the thistle for Scotland; the leek for Wales; the flax plant for Northern Ireland.

If you look closely, you will see there is plenty more information packed into the little 9.5g coin, only 22.5mm in diameter.

Most of the coins have a motto engraved along their edge, each with its own national or municipal significance. Some English, Northern Irish and UK-wide coins have ‘Decus et Tutamen’, a Latin quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, meaning: ‘An ornament and a safeguard.’ The words refer to the inscription itself, meaning the words beautify the coin, but they also protect it from being ‘clipped’, or cut down in circumference, as coins made of gold or silver used to be.

In addition, the design of the pound coin was changed every year from 1983 to 2008. There have been four different portraits of the Queen, in different tiaras.

All the coins are milled — that is, they have thin, vertical lines running around the edge, as another security measure. And every pound coin has a ‘crosslet’ on its edge, a small cross that is the mark of the Royal Mint’s headquarters at Llantrisant.

The omens suggest the new pound coin will be as long-lived as the old one. Adam Lawrence, of the Royal Mint, says: ‘It is a big leap in technology. We expect them to still be in circulation in 25 years.’

However, there is one group of people who will lose out with the new coin — anyone with a machine fitted to take the old round pound. Changing parking machines alone will cost £50 million.

Counterfeiters, too, will find parking a whole lot more expensive. At the moment, it’s estimated that 4 per cent of all pound coins in parking meters are fake. Here’s hoping a lot of crooks will have to dig a lot deeper in their pockets in 2017 when the 12-sided quid comes our way.